Intra-Symbol Differential Amplitude Shift Keying-Aided Blind Detector for Ambient Backscatter Communication Systems

Ambient backscatter communications (AmBC) are a promising technology for addressing the energy consumption challenge in wireless communications through the reflection or absorption of surrounding radio frequency (RF) signals. However, it grapples with the intricacies of ambient RF signal and the round-trip path loss. For traditional detectors, the incorporation of pilot sequences results in a reduction in spectral efficiency. Furthermore, traditional energy-based detectors are inherently susceptible to a notable error floor issue, attributed to the co-channel direct link interference (DLI). Consequently, this paper proposes a blind symbol detector without the prior knowledge of the channel state information, signal variance, and noise variance. By leveraging the intra-symbol differential amplitude shift keying (IDASK) scheme, this detector effectively redirects the majority of the DLI energy towards the largest eigenvalue of the received sample covariance matrix, thereby utilizing the second largest eigenvalue for efficient symbol detection. In addition, this paper conducts theoretical performance analyses of the proposed detector in terms of the false alarm probability, missed detection probability, and the bit-error rate (BER) lower bound. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed blind detector exhibits a significant enhancement in symbol detection performance compared to its traditional counterparts.